Picturing Halloween

(©2006 The Pueblo Chieftain/Bryan Kelsen)

I realize that Halloween is over and I apologize for the delay on my blog posting. I won’t give any excuses except to say that there just aren’t enough hours in a day to get everything I want to crossed off my list of “Things To Do”.

I got to do something that I had always wanted to do. I tried my hand at light painting. I did it for an assignment where I had to photograph a group of jack-o-lanterns prior to Halloween. The Lifestyle department decided to get some local artists to carve up some pumpkins and then we’d photograph them for a cover page.

I was given the assignment and saw my chance to give light painting a try. I am still learning, and have by no means become an expert by experimenting the one time on a few pumpkins. I am a big fan of photographer, Dave Black, who has done some pretty amazing things with light painting. I go to his website (www.daveblackphotography.com) often to get ideas and see what he has been up to. I have gotten some great information there. I would recommend his site to photographers at any level.

The final photo is actually a composite of four images. I photographed each jack-o-lantern individually and then put them together in photoshop and added the text. Each time I put a battery-operated touch light inside the jack-o-lantern so that I would have a glow from the inside without using candles and burning down The Chieftain.

After placing the touch lights inside of the carved pumpkins I used a penlight to light paint each jack-o-lantern while the camera was set at an ASA of 200 for a 20 second exposure at f/8 or f/11. I learned a lot while light painting in the paper’s studio that afternoon. Trial and error are great teachers. The first thing I learned was that I should have had a bigger light source. The penlight is great if you are doing small subjects, but for anything bigger than a baseball a bigger light makes it a LOT easier. I also learned that it helps to have complete darkness while the shutter is open and that it is a good idea to avoid walking in front of the lens while the source of the light painting is turned on. It leaves nasty little streaks.

All in all it was a fun experiment that worked just fine. Unfortunately I didn’t get much in the way of a page design for the image. The text on the photo was something that I added, it never made it into the paper that way. But hey, I like it.


(©2006 The Pueblo Chieftain/Bryan Kelsen)

This second image was an idea that I borrowed from a photographer who shot portraits of finishers at the NYC marathon for Sports Illustrated. I really enjoyed taking them and I think the kids got a kick out of being photographed. Hopefully I will get to shoot the same sort of thing next Halloween. Stay tuned!